Why Is Skillfully Handled SaaS Technical Writing Vital for the Long-Term Success of Your Business?

You’ve prepared the newest iteration of your SaaS for launch while the marketing team devised a solid marketing plan to back it up. Your developers have fine-tuned all the aspects of the product, and you already have different subscription plans set up. 

The pieces are all in place—but you’ll struggle to gain new users and keep existing ones if your target audience doesn’t understand what your product is and how best to utilize it. This is where SaaS technical writing comes into the picture.

The purpose of SaaS technical writing is to provide clear-cut, factual information about your SaaS application and its features. It allows you not only to communicate all the technical specifications of your SaaS but also offer detailed user manuals, troubleshooting guides, white papers, and insightful case studies.

In short, technical documentation gives prospective customers the necessary info to make an informed SaaS purchase. It also helps your users navigate the application and utilize it to its fullest potential, ensuring customer satisfaction and high retention rates. Consequently, it helps you maximize your MRR.

This is why you need a robust knowledge base, and to help you build it from the ground up—our article will:

• Teach you how to draw up technical documents for your SaaS product
• Explain why it’s useful to hire a specialized SaaS technical writer
• Show you how you can reduce both time-to-hire and hiring costs by setting up an automated hiring funnel with Workello

How To Create Well-Structured Technical Documentation for Your SaaS Product

Structuring the technical details of your SaaS in a concise, logical manner is just as important as writing engaging SaaS content. While it may not be as interesting to read, exhaustive technical documentation allows leads on your website to determine whether your product can satisfy their needs and solve the problems they are facing.

To establish your brand as an authority on the SaaS market—and show website visitors all the top-notch features that your SaaS offers—it’s imperative that you:

1. Understand the needs and behavior of your target customer base
2. Determine what type of documentation you need
3. Find a reliable solution to host your knowledge base
4. Structure your technical data entries according to specific topics
5. Describe your SaaS in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step manner
6. Continuously improve and update your technical documentation

Understand Who Your Target Audience Is

Before you start creating your technical documents, it’s necessary to know the wants, needs, and pain points of your target audience. This will help you determine the type of presentation that will resonate with your customers the most. It will also influence the tone and overall style of your SaaS technical writing.

If your software is designed to provide services to individual users, you’ll want to take a more casual tone—and focus on ways in which the product can help solve their problems. In other words, you shouldn’t get too absorbed in explaining all the background processes that make your SaaS work. The user wants a viable solution—and you should explain how yours would function for them in practical terms.

If, on the other hand, your SaaS is marketed to large businesses with complex internal hierarchies, your technical documents should reflect a professional, more serious approach. This means you can—and should—mention all the technical nuances of your SaaS that might impact a buyer’s decision, as well as focus on business profitability and operational efficiency.

Knowing your ideal customer profile is extremely important, as it will not only determine the nature of your technical documents but also the type of SaaS copywriter you’ll hire. For instance, you’ll want a B2B SaaS copywriter if your product is primarily marketed to other companies.

Determine the Type of Documents You’ll Need

Next, you should outline the exact type of documentation you’ll need. This is important, as SaaS technical writing can cover a variety of different documents—depending on your target audience, and the information you want to convey.

The table below gives you brief descriptions of some common types of SaaS technical documents: 

Use a Reliable Hosting Tool To Manage Your Knowledge Base

Your technical documentation has to be easily accessible and visible to clients who wish to browse through it. Regardless of whether you plan on making the documents publicly available or not, it’s a bad idea to leave them scattered across 15+ individual Google Docs. This will come off as sloppy on your end, potentially discouraging prospects from making a purchase.

This is why you need to compile your SaaS tech writing in a single, robust knowledge base. The best way to do that is by finding a reliable server to host your documents. If this seems like an acceptable arrangement, consider using one of the following software solutions:

• Notion
• Guru
• Slite
• Confluence
• Slab
• Tettra
• Bloomfire

If you don’t wish to rely on third-party software, there’s also the option of hosting the documents on your website.

Make Sure Your Technical Documentation Is Easy to Navigate

For your SaaS technical writing to provide the exact information a potential client might need, you can’t stuff it into a single database entry. It’s likely that your clients don’t want to know everything about your SaaS all at once—but want specific pieces of information about particular aspects of the product.

Because of this, you should first identify all the features you want to talk about, and then create single-page entries for each one. This will make your knowledge base easily skimmable for the exact technical info your customers might require.

Make Your SaaS Documents Digestible for the Reader

Your SaaS technical documentation has to provide a detailed, yet clear picture of what the users can accomplish using your SaaS application. This means you should explain all its features, as well how to properly utilize the app, in a concise step-by-step manner. You should also include this information logically, and within context—so customers can know all the surrounding circumstances that may impact their experience of your SaaS.

In addition, you should avoid technical jargon and complicated industry-specific terms and phrases. Instead, describe your SaaS in plain language that’s legible and easily digestible.

Constantly Improve and Update Your Knowledge Base

Once you have your technical documents set up, don’t forget to continuously improve and reiterate upon your knowledge base. 

As your SaaS business grows and new features are included, you should always update previous database entries to align them with possible changes to your product. After all, you don’t want conflicting information about your product to confuse an interested buyer.

Why Hiring a SaaS Technical Writer Will Help You Increase Retention Rates and Boost Productivity

While it is possible to create all the technical documents yourself, this process takes a lot of time away from more critical business activities. As you toil away on writing tutorials, FAQs, white papers, and datasheets—your business will start to stagnate. This is why it is much more expedient to find and hire a skilled SaaS technical writer.

By hiring a qualified professional to create your SaaS technical documentation, you’ll be able to:

1. Focus on more important, revenue-generating activities
2. Prevent loss of crucial technical information
3. Reduce customer churn and increase retention rates
4. Facilitate better internal communication

Focus on Revenue-Generating Tasks

Hiring a SaaS technical writer will help you scale your business faster, as you’ll have more time to dedicate to other business-critical activities. 

For example—while a technical writer structures all the documents in your knowledge base, you could work on devising a superb SaaS copywriting strategy that will generate tons of sales. You can also opt to hire a top-notch SaaS writer to create copy and content for your website.

Prevent Information Loss

If your knowledge base is unstructured, with key details about your SaaS scattered across dozens of separate documents, it can be easy to accidentally lose important data.

Having a SaaS technical writer organize your documentation into well-structured entries prevents this from happening, saving you time on tracking down furtive pieces of information.

Reduce Customer Churn

A well-organized, professional-looking knowledge base will also help you reduce your churn rates. If your users have all the technical data about your SaaS available in an accessible and navigable website, they’ll be much less likely to unsubscribe from your SaaS application.

This way, you’ll increase customer satisfaction rates while also turning a larger profit in the long run.

Facilitate More Efficient Internal Communication

A proficient SaaS technical writer can additionally assist you in maintaining your internal communications with greater efficacy. The technical documents they compile could prove useful not only to external stakeholders but also to members of your in-house team. 

They ensure that each member has access to vital information about your product—streamlining communication between the developers and marketing department, for instance. 

The same technical documents can also be used for reference by SaaS copywriting freelancers you hire, giving them insight about how best to sell your product, and which features to capitalize on in their copy.

How Workello Can Help You Find the Most Qualified SaaS Technical Writers on the Market

Workello is a well-optimized, fully-automated hiring solution designed to help companies of all sizes find and hire the right technical writers, content writers, and copywriters for their business.

Identifying and recruiting the right candidate can be an excruciating process, especially without a streamlined system that removes the need to perform tedious, repetitive tasks manually. We know this from experience. 

We started off as an ambitious content agency, called Content Distribution.com, and faced enormous difficulties in our efforts to scale our team of writers and editors. When we first started hiring, nothing was automated, and our editors and content managers had to post ads, send out tests, and invite candidates to interview manually. 

This took too much time away from their primary duties—editing and managing content. Our business started to stagnate, and we seemed stuck in an endless loop.

This all changed with Workello. Our new, fully automated system allowed us to:

1. Grow our company to 45+ employees in just under 2 years
2. Reduce the costs of content production by up to 75%!
3. Lower our hiring costs by 50%
4. Launch one of the most successful SEO campaigns of all time
5. Let our editors and content managers focus on their main responsibilities instead of handling the recruitment process

Everything is pre-configured, so you can use Workello to set up your automated hiring funnel in just 3 minutes! 

Start your Workello free trial today and discover a faster, smarter, easier way to hire the best technical writers on the market!